Penny Arcade on Dante’s Inferno: The Game: The Book

Maybe it isn’t entirely forthright, putting a crusader badass the cover of your medieval allegory – but I don’t care. In fact, I support this kind of thing wholeheartedly: fact is, sometimes you got to lie to a motherfucker. If showing a dude holding a giant spine with an aftermarket scythe affixed is what it takes to get young men to read a single page of the classics, than so be it. I hope these shenanigans work like gangbusters. We’ve got your backs on this thing.

Ha, nice! Interesting idea. In a related concept, a publisher is using Twilight's popularity to try to sell Jane Austen books by using Twilight-like descriptions.

Whatever tricks people into trying the classics.

Judy

Umm, there actually are published (sort of) books in which Bingley and Darcy turn out to be vampires or werewolves. So in a sense the vampire books are trying to sell themselves as Jane Austen novels.

As for Dante, there are always Gustave Dore's illustrations. I brought them up in class about 35 years ago with a prof then in his 70s, and he cried, "Oh, why did you have to remind me! I'd managed to forget those illustrations!" But I got turned on to Dante by the Inferno illustrations, in a copy a friend found hidden in her father's closet away from childish eyes.